Taylor Janelle S
Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, USA.
Med Anthropol Q. 2003 Jun;17(2):159-81. doi: 10.1525/maq.2003.17.2.159.
Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (Noonday Press, 1997) is widely used in "cultural competence" efforts within U.S. medical school curricula. This article addresses the relationship between theory, narrative form, and teaching through a close critical reading of that book that is informed by theories of tragedy and ethnographies of medicine. I argue that The Spirit Catches You is so influential as ethnography because it is so moving as a story; it is so moving as a story because it works so well as tragedy; and it works so well as tragedy precisely because of the static, reified, essentialist understanding of "culture" from which it proceeds. If professional anthropologists wish our own best work to speak to "apparitions of culture" within medicine and other "cultures of no culture," I suggest that we must find compelling new narrative forms in which to convey more complex understandings of "culture."
安妮·法迪曼所著的《魂归伤膝谷：一个苗族儿童、她的美国医生以及两种文化的碰撞》（诺顿出版社，1997年）在美国医学院校课程的“文化能力”培养中被广泛使用。本文通过对该书进行细致的批判性阅读，探讨理论、叙事形式与教学之间的关系，这种阅读受到悲剧理论和医学民族志的启发。我认为，《魂归伤膝谷》作为民族志如此具有影响力，是因为它作为一个故事如此动人；它作为一个故事如此动人，是因为它作为悲剧如此成功；而它作为悲剧如此成功，恰恰是因为它所基于的对“文化”的静态、固化、本质主义的理解。如果专业人类学家希望我们自己的最佳作品能够与医学领域以及其他“无文化的文化”中的“文化幽灵”对话，我建议我们必须找到引人入胜的新叙事形式，以便传达对“文化”更复杂的理解。
